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Have you ever had an Azure instance that just was not performing up to your expectations?

We have. And in the past, they were very hard to get rid of without affecting your entire cloud deployment.

How-To: Remove Azure instances that became slow or unhealthy

In this week’s How-To post, we’ll cover the new API that lets us easily remove an Azure instance that is performing poorly or has become unhealthy. We also share a tool we wrote to automate the removal, so you can remove dead Azure instances quickly whenever you need.

A bit of history

Back when we launched LeanSentry 2 years ago, we had a lot of issues with Azure instances not performing up to our expectations. In particular, the Azure host processes would die whenever the instances experienced high memory utilization from our custom cache layer, and begin to constantly recycle the role/reboot the VM. This caused service outages during times of peak usage.

Back then, the only way to take an instance out of rotation was to do VIP swap, or to scale down the service to a point where the offending instance would be removed (and so would all other instances with higher instance ids). Because we maintained a lot of in-memory and on-disk state on the instance, both of those options would be a huge no-no. So, we lobbied Microsoft to create an option to remove a specific instance, instead of trashing half of your service.

The Azure team came through and finally released an API to do this. This has been a godsend, allowing us to intelligently manage how we scale up and down so we can keep the instances with the highest efficiency / warmest cache.

For more on how to when to do this, and a tool to quickly delete instances, check out the How-To post here.

Automatic hang diagnostics for IIS & ASP.NET apps has been one of LeanSentry’s most popular features.

Now, Hang diagnostics are getting even better, with more expert insight into hangs, better root cause detection, and more code-level data for your developers.

Automatically diagnose ASP.NET hangs

LeanSentry’s Hang diagnostics feature helps you resolve your website’s slowdowns, better than you can with generic monitoring tools. It does this by detecting and by automatically diagnosing dozens of common IIS, ASP.NET, and Classic ASP performance problems whenever your site experiences them.

No intrusive profilers, DebugDiag, or other tools needed. Like most of LeanSentry, hang diagnostics have virtually zero overhead during normal operation, and only a small overhead (5-10 seconds of analysis) when a problem is confirmed. This means you can add LeanSentry’s deep diagnostic insight to your existing monitoring without any conflicts or performance drops.

What’s new?

A lot! We’ve improved the diagnostic algorithms to detect more problems. Then there is the brand new diagnostic report interface that gives you better guidance, and more information on what caused the hangs.

See the actual IIS & ASP.NET operation

See the actual request flow, and the key IIS & ASP.NET performance issues during the hang.

Expert guidance

LeanSentry analyzes the specific causes of the hang in your app, and gives you best practice guidance on how to address it.

Try it out

If you are still troubleshooting hangs the hard way, or trying to use the generic transaction monitoring tools, you are missing out. To learn more, check out LeanSentry’s hang diagnostics, and do a trial to see it for yourself.

You may have noticed that we’ve been very quiet in the last year. The reason: as a small team, we found the initial demand for LeanSentry a bit overwhelming. This made it difficult to focus on building the kind of product we envisioned.

So, we decided to take a year to innovate our product, and deliver the kind of experience that our customers wanted.

Today, we are back with a brand new www.leansentry.com and whole new generation of our service.

What does LeanSentry do?

LeanSentry uses expert analysis techniques, many developed at Microsoft, to give you deeper insight into your web apps.

Detect most production problems and get the diagnostics to resolve them quickly.

Give me!

If you’ve tried LeanSentry a while back, you simply must see it again.

If you have not, this is a good time to check it out! Head over to www.leansentry.com and sign up for the free trial to see for yourself.

To all our customers and everyone that supported us so far, thank you! We hope the new service makes your life that much better. Stay tuned for a lot more about the new product, our story, and much more in the coming weeks!

In the last several months, we’ve worked hard to provide automatic diagnostics for most application problems on the Microsoft web platform … hangs, request queuing, errors, high CPU, and so on.

Even though LeanSentry can automatically detect and and diagnoses many of these problems, it can sometimes it can be difficult to see how they all relate … and how they impact the overall health of your web application.

NEW: Alert layers!

Alert layers uses layers of bubbles to show you all your performance problems, and how they affect your application’s health … directly on the application’s health timeline!

With these alert “bubbles”, you can instantly see where alerts took place, how they affected your request satisfaction in that moment, and how they related to other alerts.

This can often tell a more complete story then looking at each alert in isolation.

Usage tips:

1. Hover over any alert to show it on the graph.

2. Click the alert number to make the alert “sticky” so it does not go away when you hover over another one. Click again to hide it.

“We are a .NET shop, troubleshooting bugs has always been a time consuming process of code review and digging through server logs.

LeanSentry finally allowed us to see in real time how our site is performing, providing a single platform for viewing our whole environment.

As a result, we improved site performance, and were able to be better informed about what is really going on with our physical environment.”

If you are an AppliedInnovations customer, it has never been a better time to try LeanSentry.

If not, you can get your trial account now at https://www.leansentry.com/. If you are running an ecommerce site on the Windows platform, this just might be a smart move for the Black Friday/Chrismas season.

Got slow ASP.NET page loads in your application? Should you use the a profiler or a debugger to troubleshoot them?

We put together an infographic to help you decide.

It also mentions a third approach using ETW tracing, which is what we used for LeanSentry’s new slow operation tracking feature … and the benefits it has over traditional debuggers or profilers.

Using high-speed ETW tracing for 100% slow operation coverage

We just announced our new slow operation tracking feature, which uses ETW tracing to give a complete coverage of slow operations. It combines a lightweight tracing library, intelligent filtering, and very fast ETW tracing, and an awesome report in the LeanSentry dashboard.

The result: a much better way to track what causes slow page loads in ASP.NET applications than the traditional profiling or debugging approach.

Unlike a profiler, we can trace every single slow operation, as well as its stacktrace and custom application variables, without losing it to averaging.

Unlike a debugger, we can get continuous coverage of all your requests, not just the ones you happened to catch when you were debugging.

Unlike both, its fast enough for 24/7 monitoring in production and gives 100% coverage of all your slow requests.

If you think “OMG that must be so slow” when you hear tracing, think again. ETW tracing is pretty much on all the time in your applications, and is tons faster then any other custom-built tracing mechanism you may already have going on. In fact, most apps can turn on ETW tracing and probably never realize its there.

Most importantly, you decide which operations to trace! You can add more or fewer trackers to your code to get more resolution.

Of course, LeanSentry does some extra stuff under the covers to make the most of this. We know what makes a request slow (you configure per-URL response time thresholds), automatically determine which operations are slow so we don’t trace everything, and provide a near-realtime report to you.

More resources

Learn more about LeanSentry’s new operation tracking feature – based on the ETW tracing approach the infographic mentions. Check out the demo video here!

The new pricing is a result of a user survey we conducted, and the lessons we learned from it.

A big thank you to everyone who participated in the survey and shared their feedback with us.

New plans!

The new plans make LeanSentry’s automatic diagnostics more accessible, by making them available in our new Standard plan.

We also introduced our new Professional plan, which provides users with power features for tuning and troubleshooting their apps. This plan offers features like advanced diagnostics (e.g. our memory diagnostic), and the ability to search all of LeanSentry’s data and create a custom investigation with it.

The new Professional plan will enhance anyone’s ability to provide professional level application support, without spending hours analyzing server data or even having to log into the server!

We also kept an affordable Lite plan, which allows you to get many of LeanSentry’s most popular features a lower price. We include all of our basic monitoring, popular error tracking, and basic alerts at this level.

Have you wanted to use LeanSentry diagnostics in your apps but couldn’t afford it before? Check out the new Standard plan.

Are you an existing user? Not to worry, we upgraded your account to the new Standard or Professional plan automatically at no charge. Thanks for being with us!